Download MendeleyDM: a simple solution to suppress air-water interface interactions in cryo-EM.
Rafiq, M., Schafer, J.H., Rahmani, H., You, S., Bollong, M., Grotjahn, D., Wiseman, R.L., Lander, G.C.(2026) bioRxiv
- PubMed: 41959516 Search on PubMedSearch on PubMed Central
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.02.716008
- Primary Citation Related Structures:
9ZBV - PubMed Abstract:
The air-water interface (AWI) remains the primary barrier to routine high-resolution cryo-EM structure determination, driving protein adsorption, structural denaturation, and restricted particle orientations during vitrification. Here, we describe a simple and broadly applicable strategy to mitigate these effects using the mild non-ionic detergent n-decyl-β-D-maltopyranoside (DM). Addition of DM at low millimolar concentrations immediately prior to vitrification consistently suppresses AWI-driven artifacts, resulting in improved angular sampling, reduced structural damage, and enhanced reconstruction quality across diverse macromolecular systems. Using this approach, we obtained a high-resolution reconstruction of the 65 kDa Nucleophosmin 1 pentamer, a target previously limited by severe preferred orientation issues. We further show that DM promotes isotropic particle distributions for high-resolution reconstruction of hemagglutinin, transthyretin, as well as suppressing denaturation of aldolase while stabilizing its C-terminus. Our results indicate that DM effectively passivates deleterious air-water interface interactions without compromising particle integrity. These results establish DM as an effective additive for improving the robustness of single-particle cryo-EM sample preparation.
- Department of Integrative Computational and Structural Biology, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, 92307.
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